Preview > Highlight > "Garbage" characters

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jameshoty Author

Level 1

66 points

Preview > Highlight > "Garbage" characters

I have a fairly strange issue.

I am using Mac BookPro 15 Retina, OS X 10.9.4 (latest update check 16.Jul.14), using Preview app version 7.0 (826.4).

I use Preview for reading all my PDF'es. And I highlight the text, underline, draw speech bubbles, arrows, boxes, etc

I have no problem so far but except one single PDF which is not behaving well.

The issue is this :

I click on View > Highlight and Notes to open up the left-hand side pane (in Preview)
I highlight some text and immediately the left-hand side pane will show the page number and the first few words of the text that I highlight plus the time stamp
This is fine at the beginning
But after using it for a while (which I do not know the exact timing), the highlighted text on the left hand pane start to show garbage character
Not ALL the text I highlight from now onward are garbage, some are still readable text, some are garbage. And there is no fix pattern. I will not know if it is good or bad until I highlighted on it
I did some text, copy the text out to TextEditor, and it show garbage as well, trying to change the font (at TextEditor) does not help too
Bring that PDF to another Mac has the same result
So I download that PDF from the source again and highlight the same text to prove that it is not "corrupted" at source. It is confirm that the text was readable when it is downloaded. But the PDF that I have been modifying results in garbage when I highlighted it and paste to TextEditor.
I have tried to re-download the PDF at least twice and I am still facing the same issue
I ran Font Book app and did a quick check and do not find anything that is invalid. Though I don't really know how to use Font Book app to troubleshoot for this matter.

The above 2 screen shots refer to the same passage in the "bad" PDF. You notice that the second image show the text is not garbage but when you highlight the entire paragraph, it become "corrupted"

The above image shows what happen if I copy and paste to TextEditor.

The frustrating part with this issue is that it only happen to this PDF and the problem occur after using for "some time".

Apologise if I did not narrate the problem clearly.

Posted on Jul 15, 2014 6:09 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,450 points

Jul 16, 2014 2:55 AM in response to jameshoty

I recall seeing this problem reported before, some pdfs change their internal encoding when modified in certain ways and become unreadable.

Try using Adobe Reader instead and see if that helps.

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Answer 2

jameshoty Author

Level 1

66 points

Jul 16, 2014 4:27 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

I suspect it could be me that brought up this question. However, I don't seems to find that discussion thread anymore. If I recall, there is a recommendation to investigate the Font Book app. Despite fixing it, this stubborn PDF still showing me the "funny" characters.

I tried opening it in Adobe Reader. However, it doesn't provide the same feature as in Preview. It shows me all the highlighted page no, etc but NOT the text (extracts) itself. Hence I can't see if it corrupted. Or maybe I don't know how to use Adobe Reader. I am a fan of simple software.

If I re-download this PDF from the source, and highlight on the same section of text, it will show up nicely at the "Highlights and Notes" pane. I am sure it is my Mac OS that is behind this mystery, which I need the help from the forum.

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Answer 3

Oct 20, 2014 10:02 AM in response to jameshoty

Hey!

I don't know if you already solved the problem but I came accross with the same issue and found a quick fix. First there are many threads with this topic as old as from 2007. In any case, it seems it has something to do with embeded fonts, and is nearly impossible to fix that. Although there is somebody proposing to save it as TIFF and then using OCR to recognize the text and put together all those TIFF generated pages. I did try that fix once but it was time consuming and I gave up. Anyway, today I just found a fix based on that recommendation. This one gets the TIFF in the same application without having to save different files. These are the steps.

1. Open the file with PdfPen (http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/index.html). I have the pro version but the free version also has OCR.

2. Go to File>Save as...

3. Select: Format>TIFF (print, 300dpi)

4. Save. It will save a file with the same name but TIFF

5. Open that file with PdfPen

6. Select the first page of the document in the left side of the window and press command+A to select all the pages

Ok, this is a bit tricky, just follow me

7. Go to Help and type OCR, there will apper "OCR Page" and "OCR Document"

8. Move your mouse to "OCR Document" and an arrow will show you where to go. Go there while it is saying "OCR Dcoument" and click

9. Wait depending on the size of the document

10. Go to File>Save as... Choose PDF (it will be already selected) Save and enjoy!

Now you can open the file in Preview and select text and copy it.

This may seem a long process but its not. I just wanted to be descriptive. Just be carefull in step 7. I do not why but when I go directly to Edit> it only appears OCR Page. That is why I went through Help>OCR... anyway, you got the idea...

Hope it helps an let me know if it works!

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Answer 4

jameshoty Author

Level 1

66 points

Oct 20, 2014 6:24 PM in response to Horacio_nm

Hello,

Thanks for the suggestion. I have given up on this problem already.

But you are cool, thanks again.

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